Predestination – A 4X Filled with Potential

Predestination has been cooking for quite some time now, and the team has slowly been churning out various betas, such as combat and the like. Recently they put out their galaxy beta, which includes a tutorial covering a planetary map and a galaxy map. I spent a little time with the game and honestly, I had a BLAST, so I can’t wait to see how well this comes together. This video takes you through both tutorials to show facets of each kind of gameplay, and hopefully will get you as excited for the game as I am. Enjoy!

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I kickstarted this, and have been following the progress with great anticipation. However, given how the “space 4x renaissance” has gone so far, I almost threw up my breakfast when I saw the title of this article. Not because it’s not true, but because so far, for most of the recent 4x releases, “filled with potential” has wound up meaning “big, steaming pile”.

I agree, so far so good. If I have two concerns at this point they’d be: transitioning between the galaxy map and the planet module is a little unwieldy, and on the planet map there sure did seem to be a lot of sitting there clicking “next turn” to get anything to happen. Hopefully they’ll polish that up before release (either that, or hopefully I’m actually wrong, and was doing it wrong because I didn’t understand it because I am dumb.)

I agree with you on those points, but they didn’t distract from the fun I had. I think I’m used to a lot of waiting in the early portions of a 4X game, and heck, here you have scouting on both the planetary and galaxy levels, so there will be some time waiting until they find shit too.

I made a list of upcoming space 4x games along with my comments. It’s incredible and overwhelming. Let me know if I missed anything:

Galactic Civilizations 3 – The big daddy. They do weekly dev streams on Twitch which allow you to see how the game’s progressing. Still looks like shit (old placeholder graphics) but I couldn’t be more excited!

StarDrive 2 – Spoke of this one above, but very looking forward. He’s saying “September” for release. We’ll see.

Star Ruler 2 – The original Star Ruler was a bit of a magnificent mess. I could never quite figure out what was going on, and never finished a game of it. SR2 looks to be a much tighter experience. Let’s see what happens!

M.O.R.E. – Almost two years after the successful Kickstarter, it appears to still be stuck in development hell. Will it ever come out? Will the devs ever even release any new screenshots? Hard to say. Getting a little worried about this one.

Predestination – At least on this one we have proof that progress is being made. Early backers have now had a peek at all three main “modules” of the game — galaxy map, planetary management, and tactical combat. Each module separately looks pretty solid, but it remains to be seen if they can work seamlessly together. The UI at this point is quite rough around the edges, so hopefully that gets sorted out.

Lords of the Black Sun – Used to be called Star Lords. Then they got on Steam Early Access and changed the name to LotBS. Then… they completely disappeared. There hasn’t been a post on the website or the forum for over a month. As the game stands now, it is unacceptably light in features and technological polish. Once at the top of my antipicated-list, it’s now pretty much DFL.

StarLife – Another development hell game that the devs haven’t provided an update for months. Is the project dead? Not officially, but it’s hard to say.

Beyond Beyaan – This unabashed MOO1 clone continues to receive plentiful updates, and continues to look like it’s being developed in MS Paint. Oh well, the price is right, and he seems like a nice guy, so let’s hope for the best.

Galactic Inheritors – Just learned about this one. Looks like a pretty streamlined, basic space 4x. It’s got stars, and ships, and tech, and lasers. There ya go.

Deep Space Settlement – This real-time 2.5D space 4x about deep space sett– well, you know — continues to look VERY cool, continues to be in active development, and continues to be developed by a GIRL. LOLOLlololol.

Star Czar – No updates from the dev in almost a year. I’m going to assume this is a dead project unless I hear otherwise. If I don’t hear otherwise, this is the LAST I WILL SPEAK OF IT.

Developer of Beyond Beyaan here. I lol’d at the MS Paint comment, because it’s true :) The artist does all the artwork in MS Paint actually… But it’s a lot better than what I’d be able to do. Also, it matched MoO 1’s artwork style which I personally liked.

However, due to growing attention that it’s got (I have three other people that joined or is about to join the development team, increasing the number of developers to 4!), we plan on doing a second kickstarter, after the game’s done and ported to Linux and Mac, to raise funds for professional quality artwork that don’t look like it was done in MS Paint :)

No offense was intended in that writeup, I can assure you. I forgot that Brian Rubin is a bigshot now so the developers tend to read what gets written here. I’ve been following it from day 1 (well, day… whenever I first saw it on Desura) and can’t wait to see how far it can go!

Don’t worry, I’m not offended. A lot of people has asked about graphics “Will you eventually replace the graphics, or is this it?” and so forth. I also get a lot of “I love the artwork, it reminds me a lot of MoO 2″. Hopefully I’d be able to provide two different options for graphics, the retro-MS-Paint one or the modern sleek artwork, so both parties can be happy. We’ll see how it goes.

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